[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 127 (Tuesday, September 13, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 13, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                        HEALTH CARE IN GRIDLOCK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GEKAS. Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago I took this podium to 
exclaim to the American people that gridlock has come to the aid of the 
American people. Unlike some of the definitions of gridlock, the 
paralysis that has set foot in the House of Representatives, the 
gridlock I am talking about that is beneficial is the one that has set 
upon us in the health care issue. That gridlock came about because the 
American people were not ready to accept the bizarre notions that were 
offered by the administration for a total reform of the health care 
system by throwing out the current system and bringing in some weird 
entanglement of benefits and other kinds of connections of health care 
with which we were not familiar and could not be familiar if we studied 
them for years. So gridlock came in, stopped us in our tracks, and it 
is now time to stop, look and listen. It is for that reason that I am 
introducing today a bill that would create a bipartisan health care 
reform commission. This would be a commission of 13 members, 11 or 13 
members, who would, appointed by the majority leader and by the 
President and by the minority leader, by the legislative portion of our 
Government, create a bipartisan commission much like the blue ribbon 
commission, Mr. Speaker, that saved the Social Security system not too 
long ago. If Members will recall, that blue ribbon commission, 
bipartisan in nature, just like I am proposing here, looked at all the 
problems that were impacting upon the Social Security system, and after 
a tremendous amount of analysis and taking of testimony and all that 
goes into preparing documents for the use of the Congress, they came 
forth with recommendations to the Congress to make the Social Security 
system actuarially sound way into the next century. The Congress 
accepted those recommendations from this blue ribbon, bipartisan 
commission. I would like to see us do the same for the health care 
issue.

                              {time}  1630

  Bring in the experts and have them analyze all that has already been 
done, not just to debate, the proper debate and very illuminating 
debate that we have had so far in the Rules Committee in the House, 
over in the Senate, elsewhere, on the floor here in resolutions and 
proposals, in the Republican task force and the Democrat working group. 
All of these things, bring them all to play in a final analysis and 
examination that will be made by our experts, the ones that we would 
have a hand in selecting in this blue-ribbon bipartisan commission.
  They would also look at, Mr. Speaker, and this is extremely 
important, they would look at all of the advances that have already 
been made in health care reform, not by us, not by the legislators 
sitting here in Washington, but by the folks who are doing the job of 
health care back in our home communities, back in our districts. I am 
talking about the doctors, the nurses, the technicians in medicine, the 
hospitals, the insurance companies, the HMO's that are springing up, 
the private industry groups that are getting together for helping draft 
new kinds of methodologies to bring health benefits to their workers 
and their own constituencies. All of these things which have happened 
which are far ahead of the curve which we have created in the problem 
of health care reform ought to be examined and reexamined, and take the 
best from that and see what can be umbrellaed into a national health 
care reform system for the year 1995 and thereafter.
   But one thing is clear. We cannot do it now, nor should we. Seventy 
percent of the American people say do not do anything now; wait until 
1995. Columnists like Samuelson say the same thing. The National 
Manufacturers Association and other spokesmen reiterate the same thing. 
We cannot do anything now.
  I talked to Ross Perot last week who is very much interested in some 
kind of mechanism to allow the experts to analyze our health care 
system. Here is the opportunity. We do not sacrifice anything. What we 
do is bring all that we have accumulated in our own individual 
knowledges and experiences together with those of our constituents and 
the so-called special interests in the health care issue, which are 
legion, to be able to in one fell swoop with an overriding examination 
by this panel of experts, be able to guide us in the future of the 
health care debate.
  Some would say, and I was asked this in the Rules Committee when I 
appeared before them, ``We had a task force. Do you want to do that 
over again?''
  A task force? That administration task force was a secret society 
that produced secret testimony and produced a secret document that is 
now the subject of litigation in Federal court. We are not talking 
about that. We are talking about a blue-ribbon bipartisan commission.

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